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New Video Game? Who You Gonna Call?

DAN AYKROYD is in one of his favorite places: surrounded by ghosts, or at least ghost stories.

Just steps off Central Park in the Beaux-Arts town house of the American Society for Psychical Research, in a library lined with books like “Gods From Outer Space” and “Wall Street and Witchcraft,” Mr. Aykroyd is presenting his family’s supernatural bona fides with the same earnest yet vaguely ironic delivery that has sustained his entire comic career. Deadpan, he dares you to take him seriously even as he seems to wink at his own torrent of outlandishness.

“My great-grandfather, Sam Aykroyd, was a dentist, and he basically was the local critic, the local reviewer for any psychic show or act that came through his hometown in Kingston, Ontario, in the 1920s,” he said. Referring to the young women who helped build the Spiritualist movement of the mid-1800s, he added: “The people who came through his hometown were people like the Fox sisters from Rochester, N.Y., who communicated with Mr. Splitfoot, the ghost of a person who was murdered and buried in the basement of their house. And not only did they communicate with Mr. Splitfoot in the house, but they took him around the world on a tour with them. So it was almost like they were traveling with the ghost who made them famous.”

Continuing his tour through the Aykroyd family’s cabinet of otherworldly curiosities, he said, quite off the cuff: “My mother claims that when she was nursing me, a man and woman appeared at the foot of the bed, so she called to my dad, and they opened up the family album, and it was Sam and my great-grandmother Ellen Jane coming to welcome the new baby.”

He waited just a moment for the perfect downbeat: “Of course, my mother comes from the skeptical French-Canadian side of the family.” Who else could have invented the Ghostbusters, an interdimensional squad of Orkin men? Who else could have devised a supreme threat to humanity in the form of the colossal Stay Puft Marshmallow Man?

Now the Ghostbusters are aiming their proton packs at a fresh generation through a newly ascendant medium that was only in its infancy when the Ectomobile first wailed out of a TriBeCa firehouse: video games. Hoping to break with the decades-long litany of slipshod interactive movie tie-ins, Atari, the game’s publisher, has approached Ghostbusters: the Video Game as a major production in its own right. In a reversal of the traditional entertainment food chain, the game, to be released June 16, will come to market even as planning for the long-awaited third “Ghostbusters” film remains in the earliest stages. The expectation is that the game will both revitalize and expand interest in the franchise ahead of a new movie.

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Dan Aykroyd at the American Society for Psychical Research. He edited the script for Ataris new Ghostbusters game, which is to be released on June 16.Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson — the other three original Ghostbusters — each lent their faces and voices to the new game, as have Annie Potts, as the secretary Janine, and William Atherton, as the odious Walter Peck. (Sigourney Weaver, also known as the Gatekeeper, and Rick Moranis, a k a the Keymaster, did not.) But it is Mr. Aykroyd, 56, who remains most invested in the Ghostbusters universe. After all, he invented it.

After performing with the renowned Second City troupe in Toronto, Mr. Aykroyd burst to prominence in 1975 on “Saturday Night Live” as one of the original “Not Ready for Prime Time Players.” By the mid-1980s his roles in “The Blues Brothers” (1980) and “Trading Places” (1983) had established him as one of Hollywood’s most bankable comic stars. Yet of all his work the “Ghostbusters” franchise — the original 1984 film and a sequel, “Ghostbusters II,” five years later — has been his dearest creation, the product of an imagination that combined wry comic insight with a genuine enthusiasm for the occult.

“When we used to talk about the three Ghostbusters we would say that Danny was the heart, Harold was the brain and Murray, of course, was the mouth,” Ivan Reitman, the director of both films, said in a telephone interview. “And in real life I would characterize it the same way. From an invention standpoint Aykroyd has this extraordinarily fertile mind. We used to say he picked up these secret signals from a station in outer space. He creates these very original sets of characters that are a mix of something from the outer limits that are then humanized in a very contemporary American way.”

Well not quite American. Growing up in Ontario, Mr. Aykroyd was captivated by the classic comic tales from beyond — like Bob Hope’s “Ghost Breakers” (1940), Abbott and Costello’s “Hold That Ghost” (1941) and the Bowery Boys’ “Ghost Chasers” (1951) — that he would watch on weekends at the Y.M.C.A.

“So here you have me watching all of these movies as a kid and loving them, growing up in a house where hauntings and séances were just an accepted part of the family lore, and then these journals from the American Society for Psychical Research lying around the house,” Mr. Aykroyd recounted (hence his choice of the society’s library for a recent interview). Years later, after making “The Blues Brothers,” he came across an article in one of the society’s publications that sought to explain some of the quantum physics behind how apparitions might actually manifest in the real world.

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Mr. Aykroyd at the American Society for Psychical Research on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

“So I sat down and thought, why not take the actual parapsychological vernacular as it is really practiced by those who are doing it day to day and marry it to the old concept of the comedies from the ’30s and ’40s,” he said.

Mr. Aykroyd wrote the original screenplay draft with the idea of casting himself, Eddie Murphy and John Belushi, his close friend and creative partner, as the original Ghostbusters. He said he was sitting in Mr. Belushi’s production office, at 150 Fifth Avenue (called, appropriately, Phantom Enterprises), on March 5, 1982, writing a line for Mr. Belushi’s character when he received the call informing him of Mr. Belushi’s death in Los Angeles.

Mr. Murray ended up taking the Belushi role as the endearingly lecherous Dr. Peter Venkman. (Mr. Murphy was focusing on “Beverly Hills Cop.”) Although Mr. Aykroyd has long credited Mr. Murray as the prime mover behind the film’s success, “Ghostbusters” propelled all of the film’s stars to a new level of fame.

“We had total confidence at that point,” said Mr. Ramis, one of the film’s stars and co-writer of the final screenplay. “We were at the top of our game. I remember during ‘The Blues Brothers’ Dan had been down on doing a lot of merchandising. He would say, ‘I don’t want to be on every lunchbox in America.’ Well, when it came time for ‘Ghostbusters’ his tune had changed, and he said, ‘Now, I do want to be on every lunchbox in America.’ And we were. And we were getting our own action figures and so on. We’d sort of already made some small mark on pop culture with several of the earlier movies, so we felt like we had arrived, and then ‘Ghostbusters’ kind of put it over the top.”

The second film turned a solid profit but was only a shadow of the original. As Mr. Aykroyd put it, “It was a good companion — not a fair, not a very good, but a good companion to the first movie.”

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A scene from Ghostbusters: the Video Game.Credit
Atari Inc.

Mr. Aykroyd was immediately eager to start on a third film, but his first three drafts of a screenplay failed to excite either Mr. Reitman or Mr. Ramis, not to mention the elusive Mr. Murray. From that point the series basically languished for 15 years. (Although it has always performed well in home video sales.)

But despite the absence of new film installments, the “Ghostbusters” franchise continued its hold on the imagination of fans, particularly young men. Among the enthusiasts were executives at a now-defunct game publisher called Sierra Entertainment.

A few years ago the Sierra executives convinced Sony Pictures, which holds the “Ghostbusters” license, that the game developer Terminal Reality, based outside Dallas, had the technical and creative chops to make a new top-end Ghostbusters game that could stand on its own in the fiercely competitive gaming market, even without a new film to tie it to. The game ended up with Atari after various corporate machinations.

Mr. Aykroyd is no gamer, but he was at least as impressed by Terminal Reality’s grasp of the Ghostbusters’ lingo and style as he was by their prowess with special effects. (There have been other Ghostbusters games, but none since the early 1990s.)

“In the beginning they came to me, and I said, ‘I encourage you, go ahead,’ ” he recounted. “They gave me the script. I took it. I rewrote it doing little tiny structural things, mostly bringing back the tone of the original dialogue and the vernacular — the terms, the idiom — but they really had it. Two-thirds of it was there. Then they gave it to Harold. He did the same thing.”

The game is being hawked by Atari as having been written by Mr. Aykroyd and Mr. Ramis, but both men, in addition to the real writers at Terminal Reality, readily acknowledge that is mostly marketing bunk. “They were happy to have our involvement at all,” Mr. Ramis said. “The crassest way I can put it is that they couldn’t have paid us enough to give it the time and attention required to make it as funny as a feature film.”

The game is nonetheless quite funny, and the sheer quality and expressiveness of the voice acting is far beyond that of just about every game this side of Grand Theft Auto IV.

In the meantime the screenwriters Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, of “The Office,” are working on a potential script for the third “Ghostbusters” film. Mr. Aykroyd and Mr. Reitman said the basic story revolves around the original Ghostbusters handing the torch of apparition-eradication to a new generation.

As for Mr. Aykroyd he mostly keeps busy these days consulting for the House of Blues chain of music clubs, which he helped found and later sold to Live Nation; helping to run and promote various liquor enterprises (including Crystal Head Vodka and importing Patrón tequila into Canada); and performing with Jim Belushi as the Blues Brothers for anywhere from $150,000 to $1 million a gig. (“We’re comparable to Jimmy Buffett and Paul Simon” in cost, he said.)

His film career is mostly character roles now — he said he likes villains — and in that he sounds content.

“It never really worked for me as a leading man,” he said. “I wasn’t a leading man. I’m not American. You know I’m a Canadian. I’m a bit of a foreigner, and it comes across. It’s a sensibility that American actors have that touches their own people. I never had that with the American people. I touched them in other ways — with the writing, the music.”

He is certainly un-American in his humility.

“I owe all of my success to the collaborators that I was lucky enough to be involved with,” he said. “In all of the films that I was involved with I had directors who were smarter than me, writers who were smarter, actors who were smarter. And they made me look good, and my abilities and skills supported them. I think my career has been one that has benefited from association with the best in the industry.”